Truth - Al Franken [62]
So we weren’t Nazis after all. We were just sickos.
Bay Buchanan gave CNN’s Inside Politics a third explanation, one that cut a little closer to the bone. “There’s only one reason that they want this person to die, and that’s because they’ve decided this woman is the property of her husband,” bayed Bay. “I ask you, where are the feminists?” But, alas, the feminists were nowhere to be found. They were all watching Sex and the City and eating ice cream straight out of the carton at Betty Friedan’s place. That’s how bad it’s gotten.
Perhaps the most honest response to the phantom phenomenon of death-crazed secular liberals came from Bill O’Reilly. “I don’t know why some of these left-wing columnists want this woman to die,” he wondered aloud to his tiny radio audience. “Nobody can explain that to me.”4
As good as Republicans are at spreading lies about whole groups of people, they really shine when they go after the character of their enemies individually. And no one was asking for a beating more than Michael Schiavo. Yes, he had gotten his nursing degree, but after years building his life around the care of his irreversibly unconscious wife, he had begun, with the Schindlers’ blessing, to begin dating again. Eventually, he moved in with another woman and fathered two children, though he didn’t technically divorce Terri.
This “alternative lifestyle” called Michael’s motivations into question. What was the real reason he wanted to pull the tube?
On his MSNBC show, Scarborough Country, Joe Scarborough featured interviews with a guest who said Michael was “pulling a huge hoax simply to kill his wife.”
Tom DeLay let his disgust for Michael boil over at a press conference. “I don’t have a whole lot of respect for a man that has treated this woman in this way,” he growled. “What kind of man is he? . . . Unless she has specifically written instructions in her hand, with her signature, I don’t care what her husband says.”
Soon after, Alan Colmes, Sean Hannity’s goofy sidekick on Fox’s The Sean Hannity Show, asked virtue czar Bill Bennett about DeLay’s comments.
COLMES: This is the party that wants to preserve the institution of marriage. They want to amend the Constitution. They have Tom DeLay saying, “I don’t care what her husband thinks”? Do you think that’s appropriate?
BENNETT: I don’t think we particularly care about preserving marriages like that, frankly. That’s not a good—
COLMES: Oh, please.
BENNETT: “Oh, please” yourself. That’s not a good marriage. That’s a bad marriage.
COLMES: We don’t know that.
BENNET T: Oh, I think we do.
Some of us might think that a bad marriage is when you lose $8 million gambling and don’t tell your wife. (Bennett went so far as to tell casinos not to call him at his home number.) But I’m not going to presume anything. It would be wrong to judge someone else’s marriage, Bill. I’m not going to judge yours any more than I’d judge any of Rush Limbaugh’s three marriages, or his prospects for a fourth.
Meanwhile, thanks to the heroic intervention of the Congress and President Bush, Schindler v. Schiavo was finally working its way through the federal courts. Which is to say, federal court after federal court was declining to hear the case. When U.S. District Judge James Whittemore, a Clinton appointee, issued the first federal ruling on behalf of Michael Schiavo, the right raised a hue and cry over the activist judicial tyrants who defied not only the will of the people and the demands of morality, but also the brand-new law of the land.
Curiously, the right’s fury remained fixated on Whittemore even as a series of conservative judges declined multiple opportunities to overrule him, or even to criticize him in a dissenting opinion. Even William Pryor, Jr., the ultra-right-wing 11th Circuit judge whom Bush had snuck in with a recess appointment after he was successfully and rightfully filibustered, remained stolidly silent when his chance came to champion the cause of the Schindlers. Only when the case